Javier Bardem on playing Skyfall's villainous Raoul Silva

Javier Bardem as Raoul Silva in a scene from the film Skyfall.

Photograph by: AP Photo/Sony Pictures, Francois Duhamel
, Canada.com

NEW YORK CITY — Javier Bardem, who plays the villain in the James Bond movie Skyfall, had an awkward moment during the filming. It came when he suddenly realized he was playing the villain in a James Bond movie.

“One day I was shooting and I saw Judi (Dench, who plays M) and Daniel (Craig, who plays Bond) looking at me and I forgot the lines,” Bardem recalled. “Jesus. That’s James Bond, I’m in a crystal cell, and they’re looking at me, so I’m the villain in a James Bond movie.”

Sam Mendes, the director of Skyfall — which is the 23rd Bond film and marks the 50th anniversary of the movie franchise — went over to Bardem to find out what was wrong.

“I just realized I’m in a James Bond movie,” Bardem told him.

Things went smoothly after that, at least until later the same day, when he was shooting a tense scene with Dench and he suddenly heard the Bond theme playing. It turned out to be the ring tone on Dench’s cellphone.

That’s a lot of Bond, but Bardem learned to cope.

He was in a crystal cell because his character, named Silva, is captured by Bond and brought back to MI6 headquarters for questioning. It’s a scene that’s reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter’s imprisonment in Silence of the Lambs, but Silva is a more unusual character than even that: a flamboyant, ingratiating man with blond hair, coppery skin and a distinctly off-putting manner.

It never verges into camp — “I didn’t know what camp meant. Someone taught me the other day,” Bardem acknowledged — but it’s a memorable turn that includes a pansexual appetite and a more personal motivation than most of the bad guys in the 007 canon.

He’s a combination of classic Bond villainy and a modern sensibility, and Bardem says it was fun to create.

The actor isn’t known for his bad guy roles, but coincidentally, his most famous performance was also a villain: Chigurh, the heartless killer in No Country for Old Men, for which he was awarded a supporting actor Oscar. He says Silva was a more realistic creation.

“It’s easier to portray than a symbolic idea, which is more or less what it was in No Country For Old Men,” he said. “It was the idea of violence, or of fate itself, which is what Chigurh was. But there was no human being behind it. Here there’s a broken person.”

Speaking to the press in New York, Bardem said he and Mendes came up with the main idea of Silva. “We wanted to create somebody who creates uncomfortable situations, rather than creating somebody scary or threatening,” Bardem said.

“From there came the looks … Because this thing about hair and looks, they all have to make sense. I don’t believe in the firework of it. I don’t believe you do it just to have fun with it. You always have to make sense.”

The blond hair — which isn’t as dumfounding as Chigurh’s ugly bowl cut, but has its own kind of strangeness — was Bardem’s idea. Said Mendes: “I thought, ‘That’s not going to work.’ And we did a screen test and it worked.”

The key to Silva is what Bardem calls “uncomfortableness.” He knows how to make people uneasy, and in his memorable first scene with Bond there’s a tension that, it is fair to say, 007 has never before experienced.

Silva is also more of a human being than some of the larger-than-life Bond villains.

“He’s not a man with bigger thoughts of destroying the world,” Bardem said. “It’s more of a person with very specific goals in mind. And that makes him more interesting because it’s pretty clear what he wants to achieve.”

Mendes credits Dr. Evil — the character in the Austin Powers series who is a parody of classic Bond bad guys — with helping kill that old idea of the Bond supervillain. “You’ve got a lot to be grateful to Mike Myers for because it made it impossible in a way to do that I’m-going-to-take-over-the-world-with-this-nuclear-device-Mr.-Bond.”

There’s still some affection for them, however. Bardem recalled his first experience with James Bond, back before he even dreamed of playing one of his villains. He was 12 years old, and he went to see Moonraker, with Roger Moore as Bond and Richard Kiel as Jaws, the giant, steel-toothed baddie sent to beat him up.

“And I was completely drawn to Jaws, I have to say. I was little, but I thought, ‘This guy is such a nice guy, why is he a villain?’ “

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